On Friday last at precisely 3.44 p.m. I did not have a panic attack. I had a panic wave, which lasts longer. This resulted in the biggest comforted eating in my life. The whole thing was brought on I would have said precipitated but I never went to college by a swarm of minute crises. First, I awoke as usual at the crack of noon with no unlit cigarettes in my mouth. So I had to get up. Exercise before meditation always throws my system into revolt I stood at the head of the stairs facing backwards and propelled myself with a single cough.
I was scanning the kitchen frantically for fags when I saw the wasp. Now autumn wasps, as you all know, are the most dangerous, delirious and resentful now that all the children have gone back to school. My usual technique for dealing with nature creeping into my home is to tackle the matter head on and move to another flat. Since this was not possible on Friday I stared at it for an hour or so, deciding to whom I should distribute my worldly effects. With a superhuman effort I took a step towards the door and shrieked to my girlfriend to wake up.

Softly she came down, still half asleep.
What is it? I tried to point with my eyes.
What?
W-a-s-p.
She saw it and with one hand brushed it to the floor. Then she squashed it and lit a cigarette. She looked at me. The look said "So you want to be the father of my children, how do you reconcile this fact with you being Shelley Winters in the Poseidon Adventure and me being Gene Hackman, bub?"

This set me off on an all day masculinity exhibition. I tried to stud my conversation with hunter gatherer terms like "flange", "spark plugs" and "snowplough".
Me: "I better fix the flange on the spark plugs before the snowpl..."
Venus: "What are you talking about?"
Me: Don't worry honey, you just carry on with your embroidery.
Venus: I'm reading Dostoevsky."
Me: Whatever.
The second source of angst was money. I have an account card for a clothes shop. I have this because know that sometime over the next fortnight I will end up somewhere with no money and peanut butter all over my pants. I try to buy cheap things since I lose everything of a value exceeding Pounds 2 within
minutes. My friends and family are wise to this now and never get me anything that cannot be easily replaced.
Them: "Happy Birthday. I got you these..."
Me: Wow! Four packets of Smash. I love Smash!
Them: They're on a special chain.
Anyway, recently over the summer there were some freak bursts of mildly sunny weather so I bought a whole bunch of sunglasses on this card. All of the glasses were plastic and I managed to lose a pair every half hour or so according to this bill the shop sent I bought about 80 pairs for every waking second of the
summer.
The people who write bills always begin by using airy language. "Perhaps you might have noticed that you may owe us a few coppers ... maybe ... sorry, didn't mean to mention it, would you like some tea?"
The next time they are firmer.
It has not escaped our attention that you do, in fact, owe us a whole bunch of money. Pay it."
And finally they become openly malevolent. Dear Customer, You are going to jail. Forget the money. We don't want the money. We want to see you clean your commode with a cotton bud. By the time you've finished this letter, the meat wagon will be outside your home."
These were the main sources of grief. But there was a slew of lesser vicissitudes chawing away at my synapses. Fiddly things that mount up, like the balance you have to strike between apprehending your existence as a mote of dust, on a ball of dirt which revolves through a terrifying universe and concentrating on explaining why you haven't done the washing up to irate loved ones. My Wisdom teeth hurt. I needed to clean my room. Instead of working all I seemed to be able to do was suck my biro to a stump.
Clearly, definite, even aggressive, action was called for. I resolved to overeat spectacularly. Eating can be defined as filling a need over eating is needing to fill. And I did, into every fissure of stress I crammed food. Taste, texture and temperature meant nothing. Cold stew, tuna, maltesers, banana, hummus all in the same glorious swallow. Mouthful gave way to mouthful as I poured, spooned, shoved and poked victuals into space that simply was not there.
It escalated insanely when I noticed the cheese. By now paranoia had taken over, I thought. "Nobody told me about the cheese. Why wasn't I invited? Were they gonna wait until I was out of town for the impending cheese gala?"
I can't, won't tell you how much I ate. It was like that old song,
I got no home and my leg is diseased.
Hey, Brother, pass me just one more cup'o'cheese.
Did the cheese take away my problems? Did it? Did it hell. The only way to off load the despair it created was to eat the entire tub of "Supa ClusterNugget-Chocolate-Dough-Cookie-Syrup-FudgeChooo-Chunk-Choc" ice cream, sitting there with a deep endomorphic purr rattling behind my nose bone and wishing I was dead. It was like Faust, except I had more garlic dip on my chin when the devil rang the doorbell. A button pinged off my shirt and onto the table, I looked at it. Then I ate it.
I thought about those people in exercise videos. They always smile, wanting you to think they are happy because they enjoy sparkling health. But everyone knows that crazy rictus comes from having to cavort with a yard of lycra wedged up their asses. It's easy to smile when you have a squirrel's intellect. It's also a widely accepted scientific fact that bean sprouts rot the frontal lobes. Who wants to touch their toes anyway? I mean, whatya gonna do down there?
Stuffing your face is relatively virtuous when you compare what the food fetishists get up to. Their weird menus fill you with fear. "Teeny woodland animals' hearts blow torched in front of their families in dolphin's eye sauce." Or make you feel ignorant. "Gratin of frimpet simmered in borridge and masle, on
a bed of micklebrush, kuppies and shuntynuts. May contain small bones".
So here are some foolproof recipes for those of you who understand the true function of food.

Bean Treat: Gingerly pour four fluid oz of beans or something into a jug. Cry. Eat the beans from the jug and pour the rest from the can down your throat. N.B. These taste better if they belong to somebody else in your house.

Pain au Dunk: Fists of bread, rent from the loaf and dunked into anything runnier than bread. Should eat at least six of these because ... you should. Don't toast the bread. Toast is cookery.

Pain au Dunk avec Bean Treat et Fromage
This is far too complicated to explain here. But it involves using all your fingers and breathing through your nose. And to finish ... well, you are finished. It doesn't matter what you fling into your maw now. Nothing matters. But don't you feel better? Of course, you don't.